Constraints in budget hinder civil servants recruitment

Budget constraints, lack of public awareness and complex operations of government departments have been cited as major obstacles to effective operation of the public servants recruitment secretariat in the President’s Office.

“We fail to meet some of our targets and goals including expanding secretariat’s scope of operations to upcountry regions, because of these constraints,” Bakari Mahiza, Chairman of the secretariat told editors yesterday in Dar es Salaam.

Mahiza said complex and outdated structures of government departments also contributed to inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the operation of the secretariat, leading to endless complaints from prospective job applicants.

“Sometimes you find that employment opportunities of similar categories advertised in newspapers…require different qualifications. This has attracted complaints and is being addressed,” he said.

He explained that meagre funding posed a serious challenge to the secretariat, making it fail to purchase necessary equipment, hold management meetings, pay for advertisements and speed up installation of the secretariat’s units in upcountry, but the situation has now improved. “Soon we will be having operating regional bureaus,” the Chairman said.

The government’s mission of setting up the secretariat was to reduce, if not eliminate complaints related to recruitment of public servants at central and local government levels.

“We have been advocating for a unified civil service with a view to recruiting high quality civil servants,” he said.

For his part, Xavier Daudi the secretariat’s secretary expressed disappointment at government institutions, which have been recruiting employees without following procedures, set up by the secretariat.

He said employers were only required to prepare salaries and send categories of human resources required.

He also said some public servants applied for jobs without checking the qualifications requirements and when they failed, they complained of corruption and nepotism in the recruitment process.

To avoid such complaints, he said, the secretariat had instructed that all applications be routed through the post and that a team of representatives from the secretariat will be appointed to take the letters to the recruitment team for scrutiny. The secretariat was established in 2009 and began operations in March 2010 following appointment of its Chairman and secretary by President Jakaya Kikwete.

According to statistics, the secretariat has already announced 4,285 employment opportunities from 156 employers and has more than 200 nominees in its database waiting for opportunities from the government.

Meanwhile, the secretariat is today expected to launch its website, a ceremony that will be attended by the Minister of State- President’s Office Public Services and Management, Hawa Ghasia.